Too slow [LWN.net]

Too slow

Posted Apr 20, 2005 18:07 UTC (Wed) by abredon (guest, #2038)
In reply to: pity by sitaram
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

>but there's no way you could have annotated 3000 photographs in one afternoon to actually get the benefit of this

That's the problem I personally have with kimdaba - it's too slow at organizing.
With the program I currently use (IMatch - a Windows program), I can sift through and tag over 1,000 images in under 1 hour - this includes putting each image into all applicable subcategories of 5 main categories (location, subject, image quality, process, and things in the picture).
The reason I can categorize this fast is that the tag selection is a tree with checkboxes. I select an image or images, then click on the appropriate checkboxes, then press a key to move to the next image. Each image takes only a few seconds to tag, and there is no wasted time and energy right-clicking to bring up an unnecessary dialog, and navigating down into the hierarchy of tags to find the right tags to assign (by which time I may well have forgotten the context of what I was doing)

None of the current Free Software Image Database programs (that is what I call this type of program) meets my needs at the current time, and most seem to be headed in the wrong direction by adding unneeded features like rotation and editing (that many other programs do well) at the expense of the single most important feature - quick categorization (which no Free Software does well yet).

(Log in to post comments)

Too slow - are you sure?

Posted Apr 21, 2005 14:26 UTC (Thu) by wjhenney (guest, #11768) [Link]

The reason I can categorize this fast is that the tag selection is a tree with checkboxes. I select an image or images, then click on the appropriate checkboxes, then press a key to move to the next image.

How is this different from how digikam works? This sounds like a perfect description of what you get when you choose "Edit Comments & Tags" from the context menu. You get a persistent window with a big thumbnail of the current image, a text box to write comments in, and a tree view of all your tags with check boxes. Alt-B and Alt-F move you to previous and next image, respectively. You may be right that kimdaba can't do this (I haven't checked) but I think you should do more research before making sweeping comments like "None of the current Free Software Image Database programs ... meets my needs at the current time". Yeah, I know: there's so many of the damn things and life is short :)

re: Digikam Edit Comments

Posted Apr 21, 2005 21:06 UTC (Thu) by abredon (guest, #2038) [Link]

>How is this different from how digikam works? This sounds like a perfect description of what you get when you choose "Edit Comments & Tags" from the context menu.

I hadn't seen that dialog, and it is significantly better than what most of the other Free Software programs provide, but it takes 1 second to change from image to image in that dialog. Imatch takes under 1/10 second to change images, and I can select multiple images and skip from image to image out of order if I want. Also, the only thing I can do in the (modal) Edit Comments & Tags dialog is edit comments and tags. In IMatch's (non-modal) Category Assignments window, I can be assigning tags, notice that one image needs rotating, rotate it and continue assigning tags. I can then see that another image is completely ruined, delete it and continue assigning tags, all without losing my chain of thought.

Digikam is much better than the other Free options (and is on a par with many commercial programs - I consider it equivalent to Picasa, for example), but is still nowhere near good enough for what I need - the user interface gets in my way. With IMatch, I can sit down for 15 minutes before going to bed, and quickly categorize 300-400 images. When the Free programs get close to that point (i.e. when I can sit down and classify 50-100 programs without losing my train of thought), I will switch.